“What the bloody hell are you doing?” I heard Wallace shout from behind me.

“My queen, stop!” Silence’s guard Kyril bellowed.

We both ignored them with Silence again looking back, down her body to me.

I jerked my head one way and pulled my reins in that direction.

She went the other.

“Gods dammit!” Wally yelled.

I chased the sorcerers, leaning left to right in my saddle as Regina dodged the trees, all the while hearing Wallace bound behind me at Regina’s heels.

Sending forth a gale, I caught several of the fleeing men, forcing them back to whence they came, where a wall of fire was opening in a circle.

I carried on, grateful to Wallace, who noted my gambit and broke from his chase of me in order to bear down on our foes to force some of the wizards into my line of magic.

We caught as many as we could, which drattedly wasn’t all of them, before Silence and I passed each other on our mounts, and she closed the ring of fire.

Then Silence, without pause, again tore off on her mount.

I watched, marveling at her seat on a horse, which was exceptionally skilled, and I noticed she was intent on tracking the sorcerers we had not caught in her corral of fire.

Kyril raced after her, but as I would do the same, Wallace rounded in front of me, cutting me off, shouting, “Have you lost your bloody mind?”

“No!” I shouted in return. “We captured twenty of the enemy and incapacitated nine!”

“They could have turned their magic on you.”

“They did not get the chance,” I told him what he had to have seen. “And now we must help Silence find the rest.”

But I had lost his attention. Two Dellish soldiers had approached.

“Guard them,” Wallace ordered the men, jerking his head to the sorcerers caught in the flaming circle.

I took that opportunity to turn my attention back to the battle.

I was not a military genius, but it was not difficult to see that the surprise arrival of the a four-nation contingent was unexpected, as was the incapacitation of their sorcerers.

Two catapults and three trebuchets were ablaze, scores of enemy soldiers were on their knees with their hands held behind their backs, True and Mars with some of their men were racing after enemy cavalry that was trying to escape, and Cassius and Elena, with their unicorns in the lead, were galloping into The Enchantments at the edge of a blazing forest fire.

Florian approached us, and had not stopped before he shouted my way, “Can you bring the rain?”

I looked to the fire building not only in The Enchantments but spreading into Airen.

And doing this quickly.

Good gods.

“Farah! Can you bring the rain?” Florian repeated urgently.

I could not.